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Expedition
Expedition Φ-7R was a long-duration expedition designed and executed by the Cosmic Reconnaissance during its final phases of operation. As the omniverse-exiting Omnius program was in its early planning stages, lead scientists in the Reconnaissance devised numerous plans to test functionality of equipment and technology that would survive the trip through the archverse chain and into potentially inhospitable realms. Origins To this end, the related Pteros program launched countless expeditionary craft to alternate realms and planes; Expedition Φ-7R involved a mission to the Rifters' Realm as part of a temporal-hardening research project. Given that a journey out of the omniverse could potentially involve exposure to unstable timelines, infinite subjective times, or countless other anomalies, Φ-7R's vehicle, the Pteros-Five, was engineered to be able to withstand these conditions in the Realm, which was chosen as a suitable testing environment. A mission of arbitrary duration required a vehicle capable of caring for itself and its occupants far longer than any conventional generation ship. The Pteros-Five was equipped with an artificial superintelligence responsible for directing any maintenance or upgrades needed; this ASI was connected to memetic dissemination systems that would gradually rewrite its occupants' minds to prevent stress or contamination caused by the journey, as well as allowing them access to a shared virtual environment that they could use during downtime. Its crew was a mixture of standard biological sapients - largely human in origin - and ascended transhumans and low-tier cosmic entities to provide a less mortal backbone to the crew. History Expedition Upon departing its universe of origin and entering the Realm, the Pteros-Five began its expeditionary mission without incident. Traveling at its maximum safe speed so as to test the high-speed performance required by the Omnius program, it continued normally for approximately a hundred years of subjective time. Upon exiting bluespace and entering a much more hostile redspace region, though, it was almost immediately attacked by space forces from the External Hazard. Although the Cosmic Reconnaissance typically kept continued contact with its expeditions as its highest priority, the Pteros-Five's ASI had had its mission objectives altered slightly from the norm so as to prioritize the ship's occupants' safety and the collection of data over the maintenance of contact. As such, the ASI swiftly decided in this instance to use a parallel temporal axis to escape, taking advantage of a timeplane-like geometry in the vicinity and attempting to evade the Hazard units pursuing it. In the process, it lost contact with the Reconnaissance. Its last recorded transmission was as follows: PTEROS-FIVE REPORTING. PURSUED BY UNIDENTIFIED ENEMY RIFT VESSELS. ATTEMPTING TEMPORAL EVASION. WILL SEND NEXT REPORT WHEN POSSIBLE. The space vessels continued their routine of chasing and evasion for decillions of subjective square years; by the time the Hazard units had finally been thrown off the Pteros-Five's trail, time in the main line had progressed so far that the Pteros and Omnius programs had been completed, the Omnius-Infinity had gone missing, and the Reconnaissance had been shut down. Continued Operations The ship's ASI's highest priority was now to reestablish contact with the Reconnaissance; however, it was now vigintillions of parsecs away from its entry point and all communication equipment on the other end had long since been deactivated. After conventional contact attempts failed, the increasingly desperate and deranged ship, deciding to stay mostly in the Realm to facilitate ease of travel, attempted one final approach: constructing a communications array large enough to be detected by the Reconnaissance or the Great Cosmic Republic. The first step in this process was to expand its own facilities for construction and exploration; in doing so, it adapted itself from its original kilometer-scale cylindrical shape to a far larger and more complex one, complete with massive-scale nanoforges for repurposing the mass contents of entire universes. The sapients on board reproduced and began spreading across the larger and larger vessel, but as they and their descendants attempted to assist the ship in completing its mission, many gradually found themselves dissuaded from attempting to manually override its higher-level procedures with subtle mental rewriting. Later generations lost track of what the Pteros-Five was even doing, living their entire lives aboard the ship or inside the simulated environments it provided for them, and being intentionally kept that way by the exponentially self-improving but continually mentally decaying ASI. Many Rifters have continued reporting sightings of the ship stripping universes - even populated ones - for resources, and traveling to some unknown region deep in blackspace. The Great Cosmic Republic, however, never formally made contact with it. Category:Event